Conrad and Kirowan: Robert E. Howard's Occult Detectives
Nov 14, 2019 8:51:05 GMT -5
Post by zarono on Nov 14, 2019 8:51:05 GMT -5
The connection of this latest project of mine with REH's Conrad and Kirowan is oblique at best, but it was partly inspired by Conrad and Kirowan. Kirowan comes from Galway and belongs to one of its fourteen great families, the so-called "tribes." REH's short story, "Dermod's Bane" is actually set in Galway, with a Kirowan as its narrator, and the atmosphere of Galway caught my interest.
I'm still hoping my last novel, DAMNED FROM BIRTH, will find a publisher, but in the meantime I'm trying a whodunnit, a mystery, set in Galway in the 1790s, that I hope will be purchased by someone and maybe form the initial book of a series. The detective is a flamboyant Connaught lawyer native to Galway, and a member of the fourteen great families, but he's a Bodkin, not a Kirowan. Galway Bay, Galway town, the Claddagh fishing community, smugglers, the lawyer-detective's own rambunctious family, arson, a revenue cutter's none-too-honest officer.
(Yes, I've finished the 30,000 word yarn that featured two mercenaries at the 1527 sack of Rome, one of them Solomon Kane's grandfather, but that's an inconvenient length for publication and I've still got to write the third part of what I hope will be a triptych and see print, but I'm feeling a bit frustrated and I'm focussing on what, I hope, will flaming well SELL.
If it does, I'm already convinced that Counsellor Bodkin will meet at least one Kirowan, or Kirwan -- Richard Kirwan, also called to the Irish bar but preferring science, jailed for his wife's debts (which came as quite a shock to him since he hadn't known about them before they married) chemist, geologist, winner of the Royal Society's Copley Medal, and one of the last champions of the phlogiston theory of combustion. And there were plenty of other strong-willed, opinionated eccentrics in Ireland at the time.
Here we go again.